Stripping off my clothes, I head for the shower and enjoy the cool water streaming down my body. Eventually clean, refreshed, and feeling as if I could sleep for a year, I pad back into the bedroom. Zeb has shifted position to accommodate The Dog Who Should Not Be There and is now lying on his side. His hair, which is longer than it’s ever been, is a tousled mess and his full lips are slightly parted.

I stare at him in the soft light from the bathroom, feeling so much love push through me. I love him so much. Every day it gets deeper, rooted as it is now in the reality of Zeb rather than the glamorous view I’d previously had of him.

I love his grumpiness in the morning and his inability to ask anyone’s advice to the extent that he won’t ask for directions, which had led us on an hour-long tour of Falmouth once. I love the way his nose wrinkles when he’s reading the paper and the way he looks at me with laughter and so much love in those bright blue eyes.

I know that this is it for me. He is it. My person. And that will never change. I’m a man who knows his mind and heart, and they’re as full of Zebadiah Evans as they always will be.

The light catches on a piece of paper on his bedside table and I idly look at it, returning to look more closely when I see my name. I hold it up to the bathroom light and read it. Then I read it again. And again. And then I look at him and smile because it’s so Zeb that I want to laugh out loud and smother him in kisses. It’s a list in his neat writing and the subject is me moving in with him. It reads like a careful summary of all the reasons why he wants me to live with him, and I read them carefully again, feeling warmth spread through my stomach and chest.

Then I grab his pen and scrawl something on the list before climbing into bed and wrapping my arms around my Zeb and our dog as the sounds of London outside my window lull me to sleep.

Zeb